I was 18 when I discovered poetry. Sure, I’d had Shakespeare’s sonnets and Rupert’s war verses at school, and even a little bit of Kipling on the side. But I was 18 before I discovered that words could move me; 18 before I discovered Leonard Cohen. Except, who’s going to go to bed with someone who says, “How you murdered your family / means nothing to me / as your mouth moves across my body” – although, I might have.
The thing about Walt Whitman's words is that they moved me more than any others. And it wasn't their erotic nature that so attracted me – although has anyone now, let alone in Victorian times, ever written anything quite so sensual as “A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking, / Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking”? What attracted me to Whitman, mainly, was that his words were grounded in the rawness of nature and infused with a love of humanity.
